Developing an analytic scale for assessing undergraduate students’ consecutive interpreting performances

Abstract

This article reports on the process of developing an analytic rating scale for assessing undergraduate students’ consecutive interpreting performances. The development process was divided into three phases. First, a total of 42 criteria for interpreter performance assessment were identified from the related literature and grouped into three categories: ‘content’, ‘form’ and ‘delivery’. Second, these criteria were rated by importance in a questionnaire survey of 31 interpreter trainers. In this phase a total of 20 criteria were removed due to statistical concerns, while 22 criteria — seven criteria for content, seven for form, and eight for delivery — were retained to construct a draft rating scale. Third, to determine the appropriate weighting for each category, two interpreter trainers used the 22-item draft scale to rate 33 consecutive interpretations by Korean undergraduate students. A statistical analysis of these assessments showed that the content category should be assigned an effective weight of 2, while the other categories need not be weighted (i.e., weighting value: 1).